A MAN who has spent most of his life collecting antique bottles is hoping that the thief who stole his treasure will find it in his heart to return it.

Local diver Michael Burke said he discovered that his bottles - numbering close to 200 - were missing from their storage room at the former Marriott's Castle Harbour Hotel nearly a month ago.

Some are from the Victorian era although others range as far back as the late 1700s. The date of creation, he explained, was easily determined based on how the bottle had been crafted.

"The evolution of the bottle is chronological in its design," he said. "These days, you don't find mould marks on bottles but older bottles would have been made using three moulds - prior to that they were hand-blown, and more recently, they moved to using two moulds. Also, there was always a mark on the bottom of the bottle, called a pontil mark, which would give an age.

"Some of mine were hand-blown. It was easy to tell where the rod had been used to hold the bottle as it was being blown. It was the mineral used in the glass which gave it its specific colours. With some of the clear glass, if I found it under water and it was subject to the sun, it would change colour because of the composition of the glass itself.

"I really would just like them back. I began collecting when I was quite young, somewhere between the ages of 12 and 13, and they represent a large portion of my life."

Mr. Burke, who hasn't added any new bottles to his collection for some time, said he'd stored them in boxes in the dive shop he'd run from the Marriott until the hotel closed.

"I'd moved into a smaller house and, because I had the shop at the Marriott, I'd stored them there. It was a month ago this coming weekend, that I noticed that somebody moved them.

"I have spoken to antique dealers and gift shop merchants around the island but nobody seems to know anything. I even looked around to see if they'd been smashed somewhere nearby but found nothing.

"It's very odd. They were stored in boxes so someone would have had to have carted them off by boat or car."

Mr. Burke said he had amassed his collection after foraging through a number of places around the island.

"People used to dump their garbage on their properties," he explained, "and some of the old walls are made up of pieces of broken bottles as well.

"Most of them came from the ocean, but I also found many of them on land, where they'd been dumped on various properties."

Anyone with any information as to the wherabouts of Mr. Burke's bottles may contact him at 236-2495.